Workshop #1

CURVED HOT-WIRE ROBOTIC CUTTING

Description:Hot-wire cutting has been used for cutting foamed polystyrene into desired shapes and forms for applications in architecture and related fields. This mostly focused on planar sheets of foam and 2D cutting. With the increasing presence of industrial robotics in architectural fabrication, the opportunities for exploring different shapes has increased.
Robotic hot-wire cutting enabled the fabrication of large scale spatial structures with great accuracy and precision. However, the forms were constrained to ruled surfaces, due to the nature of the straight wire being used.
In the past 5 years, the robotic hot-wire cutting explored the utilization of two robots in order to influence the shape of the wire during the cutting process. This opened up even more possibilities for creating panels with seamless continuity on doubly curved surfaces.
This workshop will focus on the expansion of shape and form possibilities for sweep surface based panels while using coordinated dual robot fabrication approach. Participants will explore various sweep surface examples and check their validity in robotic fabrication. The workshop introduces a custom computational design workflow (Rhino + Grasshopper) and a coordinated robotic setup, consisting of two IRB ABB 140 industrial robots.

Requirements:
Participant should have laptop with Rhino 5 and Grasshopper 0.9.0076 installed